From Ladder to Lattice: Customizing Careers at Deloitte

Guest blog by Molly Anderson, Director, Talent-Mass Career Customization, Deloitte Services LLP, and panelist for Next Generation Work Flexibility Event in San Diego on 11/3/09.

Careers today are far less of a straight climb up a corporate ladder than they once were. Now they often ebb and flow, zig and zag, go right and left as often as up. This shift is propelled by a host of workforce trends. Today in the U.S. just 17 percent of families resemble a Leave It to Beaver style family with Dad working outside the home and Mom working in it, down from 63 percent in 1950. And, while women have been vocal in their needs for flexibility, men’s needs have also risen sharply. Across generational lines, 70 percent of Boomers want different work options as many near retirement, and Generations X and Y also have changed expectations about how work and life blend.

Perhaps you see the shift in your own career or the career of someone you know? My own career has been anything but linear. I’ve stepped this way and that to move from computer programmer to re-engineering guru to organizational transformation expert to a talent leader at Deloitte. Along the way, I’ve stepped away from work here and there to earn my M.B.A. at Stanford and to spend time with my children and be active in the community.

Multiplying this profound change in the workforce is a lot of change in the workplace too: from flatter organizational hierarchies that change career patterns to technology advances that create new options for when, where and how work is done. Each trend is significant in its own right. The convergence of them is blurring the relationship between work and life and redefining what it means to build a career.

So how can organizations respond? At Deloitte, as we depart from the antiquated, industrial-era corporate ladder, we’ve coined the term corporate latticeTM to describe a new paradigm for how careers are built, talent is developed and work is done. Why a lattice? In mathematics, a lattice allows movement in any direction. A lattice organization, among other things, allows for multiple and varied paths to grow and contribute along.

The corporate lattice is the central idea behind Deloitte’s Mass Career Customization™ (MCC) framework. If you can customize your jeans and your ring tones, why not customize careers? Borrowing from the discipline of mass product customization which provides a cost-effective, scalable way to tailor products to customer choices, MCC articulates a defined set of options along four inter-related career dimensions. It manages these options as commonplace events rather than as one-off accommodations, in contrast to many flexible work arrangement programs. Similar to the way you would move the sliders up and down on a stereo equalizer to adjust the sound, MCC allows employees to dial their career up and down over time, in ways that work for the business as well as the individual.

At Deloitte, we’ve implemented MCC for over 35,000 employees and will complete our rollout over the next year. Key results to date show double digit improvements in career-life satisfaction, higher quality counselling conversations by a ratio of 4:1, and improved top performer retention. Our journey so far has taught us a lot and we are continuing to evolve toward the lattice. To learn more, join in the dialog on November 3 and check out www.masscareercustomization.com.

So how’s your organization responding to the changes happening right before our eyes?

As used in this blog, “Deloitte” means Deloitte LLP and its subsidiaries.